


The Bends

by artisturtle



Category: Glee
Genre: F/F, Trigger Warning: Drowning, Trigger Warning: Water
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-28
Updated: 2020-09-28
Packaged: 2021-03-08 04:54:16
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,596
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26689981
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/artisturtle/pseuds/artisturtle
Summary: “The secret of the stars is that when we lose people here, they go back to the heavens where they belong. People are energy, they are never created nor destroyed. When people die, they just go through a change of form but not their existence. They just wander into lands we have never known and never thought of existing or places we are never capable of imagining, leaving us on Earth, dreaming about where they are.”TRIGGER WARNING: Water/DrowningPlease don't read if the warnings make you feel uncomfortable or if the warnings trigger you.
Relationships: Santana Lopez/Brittany S. Pierce
Kudos: 10





	The Bends

**Author's Note:**

> Hello, everyone.
> 
> I understand that for some, this might be too soon. For some, this might even be uncomfortable. This is why I am putting all warnings necessary upfront so as to fully warn readers what's inside this. I only wrote this because I feel that if I keep this inside, I'd spontaneously combust. Please allow me to explain myself.
> 
> This weekend, I felt brave enough and I went freediving for the very first time since March. Everything was fine until I was underwater. There's an overwhelming feeling I cannot name. The water brought me too close to places I'd rather not want to go to. Going home, I felt that I had to write it out, otherwise it would fill up my lungs and it'll surely eat me up alive. Much of this story documents what I felt being underwater.
> 
> As a consequence, I had my first encounter of experiencing the bends. I have been freediving for years, and I never felt something like it. It's terrible. It felt like drowning and dying altogether. And yet in those times, there's nothing but grief, nothing but anguish.
> 
> Grief is such a terrible ocean to navigate. I want you to know, we grieve in different ways. We take our sadness in different manners and it doesn't make our grief any less valid.

**_For Naya, with a Soul bigger than the Infinite,  
a woman so much more than the Universe_ **

* * *

I sit on the bottom of the ocean floor, some twenty to thirty feet underwater, I start thinking: _was this what it felt like?_

I tried so hard to think what it could be for her in those final moments -- the sinking, the cold, being washed with an overwhelming feeling. Was there panic, was there fear?

Or is it just the frenzied calmness washing over you?

I hated how I never had the lungs for crying. Mommy had always told me I had bad lungs because I was born too early. Whenever I cry, I have difficulty breathing. Whenever I cry, it always feels like an entire planet has lodged itself into my throat and I’ll look like a fish who’s learning to breathe with their lungs for the first time.

It's weird crying underwater. The salt stings my eyes and it fills my goggles and I swallow seawater. There is a morbid, alien feeling of crying underwater.

I want to stay under the bottom of the sea forever.

The ocean fills my lungs and I swallow the sea inside me. I wanted to stay there, in the water. The water makes me feel closer to her. And it makes me feel no less betrayed.

The water is cruel. It nourishes what it wants to nourish and it takes what it wants, whenever it wants.

My lungs feel like bursting. Something tears at my ribs and my chest starts burning. Five minutes, twenty seconds. I've never been this deep for so long. I've never been this deep for so long.

I remove myself from the rock I'm anchored to. My head feels dizzy, my vision blurred from the tears and also because of the lack of oxygen.

My ears ache and there's an incessant ringing in them. The bends, I'm feeling the bends. They warned me of the bends. My vision spins and there's vertigo. I've always been warned that I shouldn't make it to the surface too fast.

And yet, my tears don't stop. Nothing could ever blunt the white-hot ache of the hole she left when she went underwater. Not the bends, not the ocean -- she is fucking bigger than the ocean, she is fucking bigger than life itself.

I tear my goggles from my face when I break through the surface. My lungs taste the sky above me and the tears flood again. I don't know where my tears start and the sea begins. 

I scream a curse at the blue around me, the blue that looks so much like the sky above me and the very same blue that took her away from all of us. I scream until my throat gives out, shaking a defiant hand at the sun as the air rushes out of my lungs and a large wave drowns my cries as the ocean pours into my chest.

It’s then that I feel someone pulling me up. There’s a tensed crackle in the air and someone is gasping before I could feel my knees hit the rubbery floor of the boat. I could taste the salty tang with my tongue.

When I open my eyes again, Momma is looking down on me, her hair wet and her eyes wild with worry. Then, I realize she’s cradling me as if I was still a four-year-old. She peppers my forehead with kisses. Behind Momma, Mommy is steering our trawler boat back to the pier, her blonde hair billowing against the wind.

“You scared me, Buddy. What were you thinking, going off on your own like that?” Momma asks me. Her normally raspy voice is an octave higher, thick and coated with emotion only a mother could feel when she almost loses a child the second time.

“You know our number one rule about freediving. You’re never supposed to dive alone.”

I feel her hot tears mixing with my own and I could also feel the shame. I’ve been taught on my first day in the water that I should never go out on my own, especially when it’s in the open sea. I looked at my hand, still gripping at the broken straps of my goggles.

“I...I was thinking...I was thinking...”

**_What was I thinking?_ **

I swallow the sob trying to tear through my mouth. It tastes like saltwater and it tastes like her. The salt, the seawater, the sun’s rays, and the winds around me taste like her. “I was thinking that if I stay long enough in the water...if I stay long enough and I reach deep enough, I’d...I’d be able to…” the sob comes through unbidden, and Momma’s dark-brown eyes tremble. She clenches her eyes shut.

My Momma knows a lot of things and she could take a lot of stuff and handle them well, but she doesn’t know how to handle this: she doesn’t know how to handle a child who had the ocean inside her lungs instead of air, the child with the trembling hands who doesn’t know how to still themselves and who doesn’t know what to do with them.

She doesn't know how to handle a child who doesn't know how to handle herself. She doesn't know how to handle a child who just lost an entire Universe to the open sea.

**_“I was thinking that if I stay long enough and dive deep enough, I’d find her.”_ **

She lets out a breath through her nose and I could feel the boat’s engine die down. Something splashes and then everything is quiet. For a moment, all I could hear is the soft lapping of waves against the sides of the trawler and the screeching of the sea birds overhead.

I could feel Mommy sitting behind Momma and she holds the both of us, pulling me and Momma into an embrace. Momma settles her head on the crook of Mommy’s neck.

A tear rolls from her closed eyes and Mommy kisses Momma’s dark hair. Momma hiccups slightly. Momma used to say that she had weak lungs, too -- lungs that were no good for crying. Charlie didn’t have weak lungs. Mommy always told everyone how Charlie had kept on crying for days when she was born.

“Buddy, you don’t need to find Charlie. Because Charlie’s always here with us,” Mommy squeezes my hand and she unclenches it slowly, freeing the ruined goggles from my fingers. “You don’t need to find your sister because she’s here with us, and she’s always going to be with us, forever.”

We stay there for an infinity, in the middle of the sea, lost and grieving for the Universe we lost to the riptides.

I lost track of time on how long we stayed in that position - my Momma cradling me and Mommy embracing both of us. At some point, Mommy plants kisses on my head and she stands to get me some Gatorade from a cooler.

Mommy moves again to put the engine on, but Momma just sits there, quiet and still cradling me. I settle into her arms. Sometimes, she moves a little to readjust her leg, to shift her position, but she’d always go back to cradling me in her arms.

“When I was around eight or so, Abuela’s father died,” Momma whispers behind me and the surprise makes me jump a little. She clears her throat. There are no more tears in her eyes, but there’s still sadness in them. “Hector was such a funny and witty man to be with and it’s just...quite a difficult time for all of us, especially for me, because I was at that age where I know about the concept of not seeing someone ever again but not fully understanding what death means.”

Momma’s eyes skim the waterline, and then she softly closes them. “The night after his funeral, your bisabuela took me out of the house and we walked to the backyard, where your bisabuelo usually sits during the afternoons. The sky was so beautiful that night, there were so many, many stars and you can see the entire stretch of the sky being divided by the Milky Way overhead.”

“She took my hand then, squeezed them gently, and told me that even if I can’t see bisabuelo anymore, I’ll never lose him because I’ll always have him with me,” Momma says. “She told me a secret.”

She pauses, there’s a lull about us and for a moment, I thought I saw something in the water -- a dolphin, an orca, perhaps just a trick of the eye, a mirage. The sea looks so much like Charlie's eyes and Mommy's and I know Momma thinks about it, too.

“The secret of the stars is that when we lose people here, they go back to the heavens where they belong. People are energy, they are never created nor destroyed. When people die, they just go through a change of form but not their existence. They just become a more disorderly form, a little bit more chaotic. They just wander into lands we have never known and never thought of existing or places we are never capable of imagining, leaving us on Earth, dreaming about where they are.”

I find my voice at last. “Do you also dream about Charlie, Momma? Do...do you still talk to her?”

Momma smiles sadly. “Every day, Buddy. Always.”

“Because she’s here with us?”

Momma nods and she puts her hand on my chest that’s faintly burning now. “Because she’s here with us. Always.”

**(#)**

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you for taking the time to read this. I have written it mostly to comfort myself. Now that you have read this, I hope this provided you a semblance of comfort, too.
> 
> If you need anyone to listen to you, I have set up a Discord channel so we can talk about things and support each other through this terrible time. We can navigate this sea together. You can slide into my Twitter DMs on https://twitter.com/artisturtle for the Discord channel invite.


End file.
